“Astronomy for the use of schools and academies.” Joseph A. Gillett (1882)
Oceanus Procellarum
His eyes the hue of all Earth’s oceans tossed In tumult (spume, spray) churn infinitely Her heart, the oceans of the moon, ensconced In basalt magma mares laid anciently He senses love and feels it coursing through Her ever-present depth, the seat of grief Conditions both are now accustomed to By life’s relentless quest to find relief Yet, love and laughter fill their atmosphere A world where they alone can live and be It saves them from an epoch of disaster– A home, a space, a place—this you and me New woven in this moment learning how Their love gives import to the here and now
Sunset over Utah Lake. (February 2025)
Sea of Scorpio
Darling, I haven’t yet told you How beautiful your eyes are Like the ocean’s depth, a sea Moved by primordial currents, dark, Yes, below the surface, but there Beautiful, almost infinitesimal Flecks of ochre, golden troves, In the rippling rich blue that Remind me of the entire universe Contained in that chasm, which Is to say soul, kelp ribbons Amber stones, acorn barnacles, Brittle stars brought to surface by Maelstrom. Sign that all the Depths you’ve fathomed where You learned through excruciating Joy and wracking gladness, an Abyss rife with life and pain, Eternal you, there laid bare Inside your beautiful eyes
each stalk of grass is hollow and barren this time of year skeletons of viridescent pasts like raw leafless trees memories of living and of dying the pulling back the cocooning of life in silent night, darkness chambers, interiors of many plants and animals teaches us all about the death and the rebirth of life, light so that we won’t fully despair
Deer Creek. Image, my own.
The Return
the light returns this morning with the owls they call from tree to branch, as sun
pinks surely over the charcoaled horizon kilned through night, and sealed in the new, cold light
of this winter morning where I’m aghast at the magic, memory magnificence, majesty transitive verb
of the whole thing where I am present when the light is seven minutes old and each
photon graces my retina with the reminder that the light always returns until it doesn’t
until the whole sky is bathed in numinous halogenic possibility the presence of the now
as the light returns may we remember the power of the darkness the importance
of slow, intentional rest, the rejuvenating properties of sleep for a world that simply needs to listen to
the magic of the intransitive verbs of owls
Christmas Windmill. Image, my own.
Dark
Enfold me in your blackness, I don’t want to be afraid of the dark In fact, I want to embrace my shadow Shadows of all that I thought would Suck the marrow out of me, but instead Offered me a respite, a resting place A hallowed breath of solace and silence Dark, the thing that so much incandescent Luminosity is meant to fight, to ward off, as Humanity wilts under all this light
Tamarisk and Gray Skies. Image, my own.
Space
Maybe the most surprising thing about poems is that they take a fair amount of space and time The words are often all there, waiting on the lip, the tip of consciousness, but flow takes room Takes open-ended realities, wide skies like altars in the arcing air, vast closenesses and distances Which the heart contemplates, the healing place, the hell, the compassionate lengths to which a Human will go to tell a truth, a peace, a playful nothing, a love, a life, a poem
The Road. Image, my own.
Don’t Die
when it began, I’m not quite sure, but as of late my son has a new post script for nearly every exchange, “don’t die” he tells me as I start the engine of the car, “don’t die” he encourages as I head off to work “don’t die” when the rain is falling in sheets that darken each atom of exposed earth, he must understand something about the nature of life
Beloved and Time. Image, Aubreigh Parks.
Celebration
sometimes the celebration will be the growing of the light minute by minute over the horizon, moment by moment in our children’s eyes. Sometimes the celebration will be the sleep, the forgetting, the separation and the longing which brings deeper communion with the divine, the place, the way, unsure, the path, the journey, one precious step at a time. Sometimes the celebration will be the growing of the self, the yearning, expanding, nearly cracking open of your sternum with the enlarging, ever-beating heart, the lungs full-burdened with life giving nitrogen plus oxygen, exhale the heaviness and grief, inhale, close your eyes and let go
And now I bow In the nave I built with my Own hands A force of will Maybe, and of Hope, and strength And love, and Power, and good Ness and weak Ness and sacrifice And longing and Grief and beginning I kneel before this Altar to my dreams Before I burn It down, before The doing and Undoing pulse Through my being And there it is Again, my knowing In the unknowing That this temple This altar this Divine expression Must ignite, must Burn, must be made Into ash, and thereby Made into everything That comes after– The garden, the Synagogue, the holiest Holy, of all the sacred Spaces, filled with the Breath, the Fire of the Divine Universe intoned In your throat, in your Heart, in your center Melted to make Way for something New
Wintery walk. Image, my own.
Gift
Sometimes the memories And myths that were woven Into your childhood become Magic again to your arcing Soul. The songs that break Forth in trumpets. The Prayers that end in good Tidings. The trees all Dressed in snow and stars Light against long December Nights which beg gathering And joy-filled repasts
Aspen and snow. Image, my own.
Roads Taken
Two roads diverged in a snowy wood And knowingly, quiet and somber I stood, looking out on the starry, moonlit way then took the path that had already been trod
With careful foot-fall through the hoary frost, after the ribbon of travelers who’d crossed the fork in the road, the decision place And rather than test the dark and the cold
I took the chance to walk along where others had gone, and bend my care instead to perceiving the moment, the present The here, the now, the trees and the fences
I shall be telling this in an age from maiden, to matron, to crone, to sage, I took the road that many had paved And made it my journey, anyway
Fern Frost. Photograph: Skip Via, West Valley Naturalists.
Braid
dark and light strands of fermion behavior spin good evil if they exist tethered whole to the same fate maybe driving Dirac’s trick as truth every particle we are made of even distantly is woven, connected to the cosmological horizon, all tangled up, simultaneously unspun strand by strand into infinity
Jupiter and the Pleiades. November. Northern Hemisphere. Image, my own.
Holocene
When the sky lifts, so lapis and milky blue, Your ocular senses are overwhelmed The owl calls out, into and through the pencil- Sketched branches of the cottonwood, then Down from the neighbor’s roof, as the golden
Sky continues to lift into day, a flat aquamarine The stark lines of leafless branches against The air stand beckoning, the promise and Possibility of new– growth, change, revivification Glittering diamonds of momentary snow still
Hold winter’s mystery. We do not know what We will be when the new buds come, but only What is– this moment, this tree, this Possibility of everything, anything Makes our heads spin and swim
Bounded by our humanness, mortality Consequence, but dazzled by all that is In us– the roads we’ve wandered, mountains We’ve scaled, journeys taken and joyed over And travailed. So much unknown
It still feels like the owl is a good omen Round white face, deep open amber eyes, wide And night-visioned, all the flecks and freckled feather patterns of each wing spread against dawn and dusk Gifts that portent deaths and lives to come
No Name Saloon. Park City. Image, my own.
Shoes
When your shoes wear out run like hell through tulip fields Take off to the mountains Climb every geologic Formation Just to Prove You’re alive You can You’re not dead… yet You still want To spend that moment with the crickets under night’s blackness only the stars know you’re there
When your shoes are worn out you take your daughter to the gravel pit and train your camera lens on the North Star tripod so still to prove you know where you are going even though you Don’t you depress the shutter let the sky bleed in for hours and all you are left with is time
No time left But you have those Shoes to remind you to keep you on your journey Home– Through– Around– To– To that time When the cosmos smudged its glory across the lens of your camera Film Still the most sure sign that the stars will fall in to center North Balance bringing these stars to you
Autumn Sunset. November 2024. Image, my own.
Question(s)
For all those who question: Borders Boundaries Countries Alliances Allies Friends Enemies Economies Lovers Children Fools Frauds Race Place Faith
I love you
Winter Dandelion. Acrylic on heavyweight cotton paper. Margo Elizabeth Glass. 2024
Night Guide
When Ursa Major dips so low In the Northern Hemisphere that Only her two guiding stars are Visible in the deep of darkness Black, the seven sisters start to rise Pleiades, in silent winter’s night as Cassiopeia, queen, stands out above The calm chill also pointing her way to our Closest cosmic simulacrum Andromeda The stars are there, uncaring and seemingly Cold, distant even impossibly far, and yet Known, seen, perceived though the crickets Haven’t made a sound, the air, nearly Incorporeal breaths of rest, sleep, A thousand dreams take flight
Peaches. Farmer’s Market. by Quin Olpin. September 2024.
Benediction
Candlelight wavers in the silent brush of the ceiling fan Night air sinks into currents of cool water brought up From the little creek, the smell of river paired with even More oxygen lifts and falls on a fleeting breeze, fresh and sweet
Whatever music and magic there is to be had in The universe is happening right here inside my home At my table, it happens in moments like these, in every Pocket of the world tonight– right here, right now, breath easy
Big Dipper. Again and Forever. September 2024. Image, my own.
Horǎ
In dream, the night is thick with cricket symphony the grass stalks golden, long and chilled in the meadow, above the sentinel oak the stars prick blackness like reverse needle-work intricate dance, flowing and fire, thousands of light-years away yet seemingly so near
The tent is simple and the lashings have been tested in a storm that whipped through an hour ago, howling at the white flaps of canvas, smattering rain onto the party but the air now returns to dark stillness. Lanterns, re-lit, quiver and sway in simple atmospheric breaths
I hug my sister close, smile at a friend across the way, eyes connecting and story-telling for just an instant and then I am physically swept away, time suspends its relentless snick, and in that instant we spiral as one
Limbs outstretched, grasping and firm as we reach for one another, smiles, countenances as wide and open and awed as galactic arms around and around We swirl in an ancient pattern of love, mirrored in the heavens templated by earth and actioned by humans
Under the open-sky, beneath the tent, midst the lanterns, our heat rising in healing, and celebration, and joy, an eschewance of hatred, a ceremony of transcendence and light through the ages
Plexus no. 34. Gabriel Dawe. Amon Carter Museum, Austin, TX.
Peach
Oh. My. God. Let the sweet nectar drip over your lips and down your chin
Why contain this experience, the velvet skin, the wet flesh
The fruit of summer realized, the sweetness and pleasure, stunning
Grosa & Nebulosa. Galaxy.
“We have to beware of the extent to which liberal individualism has actually been an assault on community… when the genuine staff of life is our interdependency, is our capacity to feel both with and for ourselves and other people.” –bell hooks
Interdependency
Oldest: “Mom, mom! You’ve got to come look at this moon!”
Youngest: “Mom, let’s dance to this song right here in the kitchen.”
Oldest: “i love you” “u r srsly weird”
Youngest: “don’t die”
Oldest: “goom, can you send me five gold dubloons for wendy’s?”
Youngest: “Hey, do you know where my hazmat suit is”
Peaches. Claude Monet. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.
Refined + Rugged 